A statue of Ukrainian-Canadian internees circa 1916, sculpted by John Boxtel, titled “Interned Madonna,” this memorial statue depicts a Ukrainian woman internee with two of her children, a swaddled infant boy and a young girl clinging to her mother’s dress. Spirit Lake, and the camp in Vernon, British Columbia, are the two places where women and children were confined with their menfolk. This statue was erected in memory of those imprisoned during Canada’s first national internment operations of 1914-1920.
Funding for this statue was provided by the Ukrainian-Canadian Foundation of Taras Shevchenko, the Canadian Race Relations Foundation, the UCCLA and the Ukrainian Canadian community of Quebec. The public unveiling of the statue and an accompanying trilingual historical marker commemorating the internment of Ukrainian-Canadians as “enemy aliens” took place on June 16, 2001.
The Spirit Lake Internment Camp in Amos, Quebec, which was built in 1915, was a Canadian internment camp which held immigrant prisoners of Ukrainian, Austrian, Hungarian and German descent. Internees did a variety of work, including constructing roads and clearing land.
